#crossmodal correspondences

[untiltheseashallfreethem]

Ok, so, synaesthesia vs. “mere associations”.  I am not an expert on this, but here is what I do know. (Tagging cant-hug-every-human, polyaletheia​, and another-normal-anomaly, since you guys were asking about this.)

(1) What experiences count as color-grapheme synaesthesia?

The short answer is, I’m not sure.  I don’t know what the official criteria are.  But I can describe my experience (I do have color-grapheme synaesthesia), and you can see if yours matches.

In my case, when I’m reading, I sort of “see” the colors overlayed on the characters, in a not-quite-visual way.  I’m not really sure how to explain it.  When I look at ordinary text, I can see that it’s black.  But then, at another level, I can see that the text is written in color.  Have you ever looked through those weird red-blue glasses, and somehow seen everything both red and blue at the same time?  It’s kind of like that.

Anyway, I’m not sure when things stop counting as synaesthesia.  Does it count if you know “A” is yellow (or whatever color), but you don’t actually see yellow when looking at the letter “A”?  I have no idea.  All I know is that for synaesthetes, the color-grapheme associations will stay constant throughout life, so if your associations change, it’s probably not synaesthesia.

(2) What about all these food-color associations?  Are they synaesthesia, or some other phenomenon?

I’m pretty sure these are not synaesthesia.  But then, one might ask, what are they, and where do they come from?

Regarding where they come from, I recently encountered the following paragraph [1]:

Crossmodal correspondences can take different forms.  Spence (2011) distinguishes between three kinds of correspondences: structural, statistical, and semantically mediated.  Structural correspondences can occur due to neural connections (e.g., if stimuli in different senses share a feature such as intensity). Statistical correspondences are learned, and occur when two stimulus dimensions are routinely correlated in the environment. Semantically-mediated correspondences arise due to language (e.g., “low” for elevation and pitch).

So, basically, these correspondences can arise because (1) our minds/bodies process two different things in similar ways, and therefore we think of them as similar (e.g., blue is a “mild” color that makes us feel more relaxed, and unsalted is a “mild” flavor that doesn’t seem too intense); or (2) the two things are often correlated in the environment (e.g. bitter things are often dark brown); or (3) we use the same language to describe two different things, so they become associated that way.

[1] Levitan et al., “What Color is that Smell? Cross-Cultural Color-Odor Associations”, CogSci 2014.

[untiltheseashallfreethem]

tendrilsofreality said: Ooh! I reblogged this for being interesting before finishing it. Then I got to the sounds correspond to meanings part. I’m thrilled that this research is being done; that sounds were arbitrary always seemed wrong to me. Phonetic qabalah is possible.

Yes, this is totally a thing that people research!  One keyword is "sound symbolism", which is a special case of crossmodal correspondences.  You may also want to look up the "kiki bouba effect" (though I probably already told you about that).

From the little I've read, crossmodal correspondences seem to encompass both "inherent" connections between sounds and meanings (like the sort the article discusses, where the meaning arises from how the sound is made in the mouth), as well as semantically mediated connections (where a sound comes to be associated with a meaning because words with that sound often have that meaning).

The latter kind of connections are also called "phonaesthemes", and if you google that word you'll find a lot of cool examples.  They mostly come into existence for etymological reasons, I think.  Anyway one example is that words beginning with "sn" often have to do with the nose or mouth, e.g. sneer, snout, sniff, snarl, and so on.

[untiltheseashallfreethem]

Interesting article on how products are named.

[untiltheseashallfreethem]

polyaletheia said: I think they’re called birds?

Yeah, that's roughly what I was thinking.  But it's still really interesting to me, for two reasons: (1) it sounds like the correspondence carries over to non-bird stimuli as well, and (2) if it's innate, then OMG an archetype of the collective unconscious!  Also, there is (3), which is "OMG scientific evidence of correspondences, which is highly relevant to questions of whether magick actually works".

Anyway I'm still only like two pages into this paper, so I can't give you much information yet.  But I'm reading this paper because it talks about the different ways that such correspondences can arise.  I'll write a quick outline of what I've learned after I'm done reading it.

[untiltheseashallfreethem]

Interesting fact (from Spence 2011, "Crossmodal correspondences: A tutorial review"):

A large body of research now shows that people exhibit consistent crossmodal correspondences between many stimulus features in different sensory modalities. For example, people consistently match high-pitched sounds with small, bright objects that are located high up in space.